Tuesday, August 20, 2013

I Can't Pronounce These, Either

Question: Is Chi You best used as a member of the Han pantheon, a non-Han pantheon, or a Greater Titan? On one hand, he did fight the Yellow Emperor, but on the other hand, he seems to have had a Han cult in ancient times and some Chinese minorities still claim him as an ancestor.

Poor China. So problematic, and nobody ever wants to help.

This is where I wrote a giant paragraph about all the problems inherent in trying to separate layers of Chinese religion by dynasties and how the historical rulership periods don't necessarily match up to cultural and religious movements...

...but then I realized that you probably meant a Han pantheon as in the gods of the Han-speaking Chinese who recorded most of China's mythology for posterity, as opposed to gods worshiped or borrowed from nearby ethnic groups like the Mongolians, Tibetans, Manchu or others that are technically geographically Chinese but ethnically and culturally different. In which case I am totally with you. China contains a really vast amount of territory and a lot of different peoples, and the fact that the Han are currently the overwhelming majority doesn't mean that it was always so or that the other ethnic groups should be considered the "same", any more than all the Australian groups across the whole continent should be considered the same.

But anyway, Chi You. The insanely monstery descriptions of his appearance certainly sound like a Titan, as do the accounts of him as a tyrannical and cruel ruler who abused the people and landscape alike, not to mention doing obviously supernatural crazy things in his battles against Huang Di. If it weren't for Scion: Companion's insistence on Hundun not having Avatars, he would undoubtedly already be one, and he'd slot in neatly in either a Chaos realm (representing the destabilization of fighting against rightful authority), a War realm (as one of the great war-wagers against the gods) or even a Justice realm (as a representative of tyranny and abuse of power).

Chi You does have connections as the ancestor of several Chinese ethnic groups, most notably the Li/Hlai and the Miao/Hmong. It's hard to tell (because it's largely the Han that wrote everything down so we're mostly stuck with their bias) whether this is a myth that those groups came up with themselves, or one that was placed onto them by the Han and later so traditionally entrenched that they adopted it themselves. It's almost solely in those ethnic groups - which are way, way minorities in China - that Chi You has even vaguely positive connotations, mostly to do with imparting prestige or reputation to his descendents and helping shape ancient China, both of which are possibly good but also possibly referring to his shenanigans in the war against Huang Di. To those small groups, Chi You probably would be more likely to be a tutelary deity instead of a Titan.

The question that it always comes down to, with overlapping groups that have different takes on a given figure, is this: are you going to use both a Han and a Hmong pantheon? If you are, then Chi You is probably best used as one of the presiding deities of the latter. But if you're not - and I would assume most people are probably not, because that's a shit-ton of intensive research for a comparatively small culture that most players aren't even aware exists - then Chi You should probably be run as a Titan, because that's how he appears in the mainstream Chinese pantheon and it would be a shame to kick him out of the game based on a mythology that's not actively in use. A third option, if you really love him as a bad-attitude god instead of a Titan, would be to use him as one of those "pantheon-less gods" we always talk about maybe adding, although I'm not sure if it's worth it unless your game (players or Storyteller) are really Sinophile enough to care.

But hey, we're all about some Scionly use of obscure but awesome pantheons by anyone who is interested in them, so if you want to investigate a Hmong pantheon, please tell us about it when you're done! Other major gods (more major than Chi You, more properly written Txiv Yawg in Hmong) would include Saub, the benevolent creator god, Nplooj Lwg, the frog-god who both created mankind and cursed them with human misfortunes when they betrayed him, and Ntxwj Nyug, the terrifying lord of the Underworld who eats some of the dead once they have been turned into his cattle after shuffling off their mortal coils. It's a smallish pantheon with only a handful of gods, but that doesn't mean you can't do rocking stuff with it if you put your mind to it.

We would probably use Chi You as a Titan; he's a clearly monstrous opponent of the Shen with a serious grudge against the gods, and he probably can't wait to wreak a little havoc. But it's not the only option, so use your judgment and go nuts!

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